THE ORIGINS OF SPACE AND TIME

摘要

"Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game" says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, "everything around us-the whole three-dimensional physical world-is an illusion born from information encoded elsewhere, on a two-dimensional chip". That would make our Universe, with its three spatial dimensions, a kind of hologram, projected from a substrate that exists only in lower dimensions. This 'holographic principle is strange even by the usual standards of theoretical physics. But Van Raamsdonk is one of a small band of researchers who think that the usual ideas are not yet strange enough.